“I thought not.” Regulo’s hands were behind him against the wall. A panel slid open to reveal a dimly lit corridor. “We respect money, you and I, but it has never been the main drive for either of us.” He sighed. “It’s a pity. We could have done great things as a team.”
“I know. Great things.” Rob’s voice was scarcely loud enough to hear. “To work with you, Regulo, for that I’d have given everything I own. But this is different. There are some rules that I can’t break.” He cleared his throat and spoke more loudly. “It’s over.”
“Not everything.” Regulo stepped back through the opening. Rob and Corrie did not move. “When you came in, I suspected that Atlantis was finished one way or another. So while were were talking I set the controls for collision with Lutetia. We have a few more minutes before impact.” He pointed again to the screen, to Lutetia’s swelling bulk. “After that, it’s no more Atlantis. No more Morel, no Goblins, no Caliban, no Sycorax. No evidence to support anything that you said. Follow me, both of you, or there will be no Rob Merlin and no Cornelia.”
The panel began to close.
“I’ll hold the ship for you.” There was a plea in Regulo’s bright eyes. “Hurry. I have to destroy Atlantis, but I can’t stand the thought of losing either of you.”
While the wall panel was still closing, Corrie ran rapidly around the desk and began to examine the settings on the controls. Rob dragged himself wearily across to join her.
“What’s the maximum drive setting for Atlantis?” He could feel pulses of pain running up his arm and through his whole body.
“About a thirtieth of a gee.” Without waiting to consult Rob, Corrie was throwing in new settings. “That’s not the point. The outer surface will fail at much less than that. I don’t think we dare try for more than a hundredth of a gee.”
“What happens if the outer membrane bursts?”
“The aquasphere would flood the drives. We’ll burn up in Lutetia.”
Rob moved to the display console and switched in a camera to show the exterior of Atlantis.
“Don’t use that drive unit, Corrie. It’s the best one for the direction of thrust that we need, but we’d fry Regulo. He’ll be coming out of that shaft. Take the next two drives and balance their thrusts. It will be close enough to tangential, we won’t lose more than a few percent effectiveness.”
He leaned across the desk, wincing as his left hand touched it. “Give us a fiftieth of a gee.”
“That’s too high. We’re only rated for half that.”
“Do it — and pray that Regulo over-engineered his products.”
There was a small but perceptible jolt as the two drives cut in. The image of Lutetia did not move on the screen.
“It’s not working, Rob.”
“Give it time. Accelerations take a while before you see the effects.” He was watching a second display, but it blurred as he stared at it. His eyes were refusing to focus. “Good thing we didn’t use that first drive, Corrie. Here comes Regulo, out of the shaft.”
A small, white-suited figure emerged from the exit tunnel closest to the waiting ship.
“He’ll go across to the ship, Rob.”
“Let him. We can’t stop him.”
“What happens if we can’t save Atlantis?”
Rob shrugged. “Tough on us, good for Regulo. He was right, without the Goblins or Caliban there will be no evidence. Even if we escaped, he still has all the money and influence. No one would ever believe me.”
Strain gauge readings from the skin of the aquasphere were well past the safety limits. Under the steady acceleration, a billion tons of water wanted to stay behind.
“It’s going to be close.” Corrie was looking at the fiery ball of Lutetia, now beginning to drift slightly sideways on the screen. “Awful close. The surface of Atlantis seems to be holding, but we have to get by Lutetia without boiling the aquasphere.”
“Look at the other screen.” The tone in Rob’s voice brought Corrie’s instant attention.
“What’s he doing, Rob?”
“I don’t know. Can you bring in his audio channel?”
“I’ll try.”
Regulo’s suit was visible as a tiny white speck on the screen in front of them. Instead of heading for the waiting ship he was moving in erratic bursts, backwards and forwards. Under the random thrusts of the suit jets he was still approaching the molten surface of Lutetia. The asteroid blazed before him with an intense white heat, filling the sky.
“I’ve got him on audio.”
Corrie’s words were lost in a hoarse, painful grunting. It was Regulo, muttering something to himself.
“Lutetia is blinding him,” Rob said suddenly. “It’s so bright, and so close. The photo-shield on that suit was never intended to handle that much intensity. Corrie, he’s lost his bearings.”
The erratic to-and-fro motion had ceased. Regulo was spinning aimlessly, jets firing at random. The white suit was moving closer to the surface of Lutetia.
“What’s he saying, Rob? Listen to him. He doesn’t seem to know what’s happening.”
“You got Alexis and you got Nita.” The hoarse voice from the suit was suddenly loud and intense. “Not me, though. You won’t get me. I beat you once, I’ll beat you again. I’ll master you.”
Rob looked back to the other screen. The swollen sphere of Lutetia was sweeping past Atlantis. It seemed close enough to touch, but they would clear it. His arm shot bolts of agony through his whole body. How could that happen, with the power off? Would he ever find out?
He slumped back in his seat, holding his forearm with his right hand. Atlantis was groaning and straining about them, the complaining creak of twisting braces and stressed partitions as loud as the angry words of defiance from Regulo’s suit. Rob felt a white tide rising in his head, sweeping up to engulf him as Lutetia would engulf Darius Regulo.
They were clearing the asteroid. In the moment before the tide swallowed him completely, Rob saw the tiny figure of the King of Heaven move on to its final rendezvous.
CHAPTER 17: A Bridge to Midgard
Eleven hours. Contact minus 40,000.
After weeks of waiting, the beanstalk had begun to uncoil its slow length. Under the combined influence of gravity and precise control thrusts it had left its position at L-4 and embarked on the long fall to Earth. The main load-bearing cable was hidden, covered along most of its length by superconducting power cables and the regularly spaced ladder of the drive train. One hundred and five thousand kilometers long, the assembly stretched now like a fine silver thread across the Earth-Moon system, spanning an arc one-fourth the way from Terra to Luna. Far from that arc, accelerating on a trajectory that would take it to a perigee distance ninety thousand kilometers from the surface, a billion tons of rock and metal had begun its own approach. Unchecked, it would swing in to Earth and away again, out past the Moon before it slowed to a distant apogee.
One year ago, the rock had been a natural feature of the Solar System. Its orbit had dipped in an eccentric path from Saturn to Venus. From all the millions of candidate rocks whose composition, mass and orbits were stored in the data banks, Sycorax had made the selection of this single asteroid as the rock best suited to the beanstalk’s needs. After careful shaping of the exterior, and delicate adjustments to the mass distribution, Sycorax had pronounced it ready. The asteroid could now fulfill its new purpose in the System. It would be the ballast, the bob at the end of the pendulum.
The rest of the components waited in synchronous orbit, stationary above Quito. The powersat was already functioning, its array of photovoltaic receptors turned away from the sun until they were needed. Close by hung the ore-carriers, passenger modules and maintenance robots, a thousand separate units loosely linked by a restraining net of thin cables. Until Contact there would be nothing but patient waiting. Then the robots would race along the beanstalk’s length.